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Understand your Backup Technology – Agent vs Agentless Backup

To be Virtual or not to be Virtual?

The evolution of technology from standalone physical servers to shared resource virtualization, creating resource elasticity and so have other technologies evolved to join the virtualization revolution. Many companies have completed a 100% migration to virtual, some are still in this process.

One key technology that has had to keep up is backup and disaster recovery, simply because whether your files server was physical then and virtual now it is the same data and of the same importance to the business, A lot of companies have had to change backup vendors or purchase a different package or even add-on to facilitate the move possibly even keep certain older licensing behind for legacy system that have not yet been virtualized.

Arcserve has been very flexible in this aspect regarding the migration to virtual, physical server licenses where just carried over to physical hypervisor hosts and restore features such as virtual standby, Instant VM restore and full system high availability allowed for the migration & conversion process to be automated with ZERO data loss and in some cases zero downtime. This has added ease to the migration and sped up the virtual revolution globally.

After the Migration (To Be Virtual)

Backup technologies can offer an additional method of backup, a method that would not install into or alter the production environment any way leaving it hands free, this is the agentless method. The agentless method allows for backup software to speak to the hypervisor vendor API and request actions to be performed on the virtual machines. In the case of backup it would look like below steps on a high level.

Find available servers for backup

Create a temporary snapshot on target virtual disks

Extract backup data from target virtual disks

Transfer backup data to destination

Delete temporary snapshot

This allows for quicker deployments and more efficient backups, however there are concerns.

First concern taking a temporary snapshot of a virtual disk without knowing what I/O operations are completing within the virtual disk at that point in time could result in capturing a partial operations resulting in inconsistency of application data when it comes time to restore. Further API integration such as the use of VIX library for VMware and host integration tools for Hyper V allows for backup software to access guest operating system files and services within the Virtual Target Disks. This creates application aware backups on the agentless process.

A second concern that creating snapshots and holding snapshots can increase used space on the production shared volumes & add a degrade of I/O performance to target virtual machine disk during online agentless backups. When the snapshot is created it the base virtual disk is in a frozen state and a secondary disk (The Snapshot) holds differential data of the base disk, this then bloats the size of the target VM storage usage on shared storage volumes , vendor KBs suggest 10 – 20 % storage increase on high transactional virtual machines while snapshot is present. If you are processing all virtual machines on a single shared storage concurrently you need to make sure that you have at least 10-20% free for storage to burst during backup.

The reason for the added I/O overhead during snapshot usage is that read access to guest OS files would need to read original base files and all differencing data since snapshot creation, the larger the snapshot the more data we can assume is needed to be read.

A third concern is that software snapshots don’t support certain devices so not all disk devices attached to a virtual machine will be captured for examples are, passing through physical disk devices from hypervisor host to the virtual machine, IscsI Mounts, RDM Raw Device mapping of LUN from a storage array and more… What happens in these cases is that a virtual machine has OS disk provisioned as a virtual disk but secondary storage device is directly to a physical array volume. An easy example here would be an application that has redundancy though multiple nodes however share the same data eg. SQL Cluster with shared storage for database.

In cases like these where Agentless is not a fit you need to revert to the traditional backup through an Agent.

Agent Based Backup

Agent based backup is the process of installing a software package from the vendor in the target system, this will communicate with the backup server and utilise target services and resources to perform and capture backup such as shadow copy service and VSS writers like SQL or Exchange writers for application backup. This using the target system resource to create the backup rather than impacting shared resources as on agentless cross shared virtual infrastructure. This can be a lengthier backup windows compared to agentless approach.

A lot of systems are left physical and for good reason. Servers that require physical monitoring or licensing via dongle USB key, systems or application servers that licensing is not compatible with virtual hardware, systems that the virtual infrastructure is dependent on, in cases domain controllers or networking systems.

These systems will still utilise agents for data protection rather than agentless in the fear of virtualising and creating in necessary downtime.

The Migration Magic Wand

With Arcserve, both agentless backups and agent based backups can be sent to the same backup server and data is compared and deduplicated cross technologies, further compressed and stored that is true global deduplication!

As mentioned earlier in the article, Arcserve has changed the virtualization landscape by offering a solution that followed its licensing during migration and facilitated the migration to virtualization.

The question whether or not to virtualise a specific system or application is a hard one and requires planning, testing, more testing and hopefully execution at some point. If we introduce Arcserve into this scenario because of Arcserve being hardware agnostic and hypervisor agnostic we can safely backup a physical system or application online, spin up an Instant VM of the physical server backed up onto the hypervisor of choice and test functionality and impact without down time and without hours or days of preparation once confirmed happy, system is functional we can run another backup repeat or avoid data loss through a Arcserve high availability agent . This would create a virtual instance on request with continuous replication to avoid any data loss.

A few days pass and we realise we have overlooked a specific detail and the system is not performing to business standard as virtualised. It can’t be fixed and we need to return to physical. We simply back up VM agentless or with an agent and run a bare metal recovery to the original hardware or newer. Even simpler, we can create a Arcserve HA BMR to allow us to fail back as a high availability process to the physical servers again.

The Conclusion

Whether you want to virtualize or have virtualized or won’t virtualise, that is 100% your choice but choose a backup and disaster recovery vendor that can transition through those phases without having to repurchase and avoid multiple vendors to complete a single task or single solution.

I end with a Quote

One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain. – Rick Godwin

2016 saw a lot of growth to functionality of Arcserve, having introduced lots of new exciting features and changes in technology. In this article, I look at the newest added features in Arcserve UDP 6.5. (I left out existing features and performance enhancements so to focus on the newest features only.)

Instant Recovery Of Physical Server P2V IVM

An instant VM restore or IVM is mounting your latest backup point to your Hypervisor host as a temporary data store point and registering that VM into the Virtual infrastructure for immediate accessibility. It’s no longer necessary to wait for your restore to copy points from backup disk into production – with IVM your RTO is seconds to minutes.

UDP has had this feature from version 6.0. UDP can support Instant VM restore Cross-Hypervisor IVM V2V, instantly restore a VMware VM onto Hyper-V and visa versa. UDP also protects physical machines and allows for instant VM recovery of a physical node “ P2V IVM “ to Vmware or HyperV.

Nimble Storage Snapshot Integration

You can lower the additional impact from backup activities on production storage by retrieving VM data from storage snapshots on primary storage and replicated copies on secondary storage.

UDP has expanded on its existing integrations with NetApp, Nimble and Kaminiario and extends its direct Storage Snapshot support to HPE 3PARStoreServ Storage in version 6.5.

Direct Restore to Public Cloud

This enables users to take on-premises workloads and restore or migrate them to public cloud platforms. This can allow for disaster recovery strategy, development scenarios for testing or ease resource constraints on site by migrating workloads to scalable public cloud platforms.

UDPThe Arcserve UDP Virtual Standby plan now supports the conversion of the recovery points to virtual machine formats on AWS EC2 with the help of the snapshots to restore your data easily. This feature ensures the highest available capability by using the public cloud and helps in shifting your backup environments on premise to AWS EC2 easily and quickly.

Backup for Microsoft Office 365

The Exchange Online component of Office 365 provides an offering for companies to utilise Exchange Mail services via Microsoft’s public cloud platform on a subscription basis. The challenge here has always been protecting and ensuring the recoverability of this public cloud exchange data in Office 365.

UDP also produces the new feature to help organizations protect the Office 365 emails hosted on Microsoft’s public or private cloud. Using this feature, users can secure and maintain a local backup of their Office 365 email data, eliminating the risk of data loss due to an outage or accidental deletion. Backup administrators can protect individual items such as emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, notes and so on. They can search the protected items and restore them using a wide range of flexible recovery options.

Additionally, by using the smart filter feature, administrators can opt to selectively back up only important folders and exclude others (for sync issues, clutter and so on). The feature reduces the backup window and helps to save the crucial network bandwidth and storage.

Backup Agent for Linux

This is a software agent designed to be installed on physical servers to allow the Linux file system and applications to be backed up. This is not new technology.

UDP: Agents for Linux have been around from the beginning of UDP. Arcserve also uses a single Linux system with an agent installed to orchestrate backups to all other Linux physical servers in the environment. Arcserve can do agent-free backup of Linux physical servers, only requiring one server to hold the Linux agent.

Agent for Windows

This is a software agent designed to be installed on physical servers to allow their Windows file system and applications to be backed up. This is not new technology.

UDP: Arcserve Windows agent for physical servers has been around since the inception of UDP and has support from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1, all the way to the newest Windows Server 2016.

Backup from UNC Paths/Network Shares

This is the capability of protecting and backing SMB (CIFS) shares exported by an operating system or presented by a storage device link NAS.

UDP is now capable of protecting SMB (CIFS) shares exported by Windows, Linux, and NAS devices. As well as using such paths as a backup destination. This is a great feature for SMBs that don’t own file servers or don’t have storage capacity to protect an entire file server, they can rather just the share the path.

Automatic Protection of Newly added VMs to Hosts or Resource Pools

In Vmware, Vcentre VMs are sorted and grouped by resource pools. Having the ability to protect a resource pool allows newly created VMs on the Hypervisor to join a current backup job or policy. This reduces the administrative time of adding VMs to backup jobs through backup vendor software. This ensures instant protection.

UDP: In Arcserve’s newest release V6.5 you can protect a single container object (such as a resource pool) in the vSphere hierarchy. This way, new VMs added into the container object are protected automatically.

Recovery Point Testing

This feature will allow backup software to test the recovery point just made of a production server to ensure integrity of the recovery point. This will avoid any complications during a restore process.

UDP has added a new feature called Assured Recovery, which allows you to view the health status of the recovery points. The integrity and recoverability of recovery points are tested on a scheduled basis by automatically creating instant virtual machine copies or instant virtual disk copies. Additional built-in functions can test the file systems of IVM or IVD clones. No pre-set rolee scripts are available, but the option is available to run one’s own custom script against an Assured Recovery test.

SLA Reports for RTO and RPO on Protected Systems

SLA reporting on RTO and RPO allows the backup software to manage and report on protected servers and whether they are meeting RPOs (Backup windows) or RTO (Required Restore times). SLAs would be defined based on required up time and data loss policies for critical systems or applications in an environment.

UDP has added SLA reporting for RTO and RPO to the newest release 6.5. Arcserve UDP’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) report is to help organizations generate compliance reports related to Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

RTO Report: The Arcserve UDP RTO report is a compliance report that displays the comparison of Recovery Time Actual and Recovery Time Objective values for all the executed recovery type of jobs, such as file system restore, VM recovery, BMR, Instant VM, and Assured Recovery. You can further drill down to see node level status filtered by ‘RTO met’, ‘not met’, ‘not tested’, and ‘not defined’ statuses.

RPO Report: The Arcserve UDP RPO report displays the total number of nodes with available recovery points during the specified time period in the bar view, categorized by age of the latest recovery points (15 minutes, last hour, 12 hours, last day, and so on), age of oldest recovery points (30 days and older), and monthly distribution (Jan – Dec). You can further drill-down to see node level statuses for the selected category.

This is all included under the UDP software suite and does not require addition purchase or licensing.

The Big Conclusion

Arcserve’s newest releases are way ahead of all the other competitors in terms of marketing and making waves.

In my opinion Arcserve, because of the physical and virtual portions, allows for the solution to be completely agnostic to customer hardware and Hypervisor choice and is a truly unified solution.

Arcserve also holds the high availability features set that been around for years. This eliminates RPO and RTOs as there is no data loss and no downtime. It’s more than just back up and disaster recovery, it’s business continuity too.

Arcserve provides both physical and virtual, unified and high availability features with enterprise reporting in a single installation, single interface, and a single license.

The purpose-built appliance market has drastically changed in the past year, particularly in the mid-market. Historically, organizations looking to purchase all-in-one backup and recovery appliances only had a few limited choices, and specifically in the sub-100TB segment of source backup data.

The emergence of Arcserve UDP Appliances is changing the game, in particular for existing customers and prospects of Company U. There many reasons to underscore the acceleration of Arcserve UDP Appliances, and the subsequent reversal in market adoption for Company U’s solution.

While I will provide more specific detail below, let me net it out executive summary style:

Arcserve UDP Appliances are more cost-effective and provide more features than company U; one reason being their poor deduplication technology.

Company U’s reviews and tech support complaints on public community boards are at an all- time high.

Arcserve’s business is growing across the board, and our appliances and software have become the natural replacement for the aging and inefficient technologies in many organizations.

The smoking gun

One of the ways to determine marketing claims is to simply take a look at specifications and features. While Company U offers data deduplication – something you need as an end-user – it clearly lacks efficiency compared to the deduplication technology delivered by Arcserve..

How do you check? It’s simple: Take a look at the recommended configurations to see what model you’d need (how much on board-storage) to protect the amount of backup data (source data) you have in your environment, given some retention parameters.

But be careful, because Company U will tell you that its 120TB raw storage system can backup 80TB of data. (As a side note, in talking to customers in the field we believe it’s actually closer to 50TB – but let’s go with 80TB.) Conversely, Arcserve recommends a 30TB raw storage system for protecting roughly 90TB of source data. Note the difference here; needing 120TB vs 30TB to backup roughly the same amount of source data. In addition, it takes a 4U rack for Company U whereas the Arcserve UDP Appliance only requires a 2U rack.

Why does this matter? Read on to learn more about key differences in features and capabilities.

More features – that work

Deduplication:

Arcserve’s deduplication technology is global source-based deduplication. This means that the deduplication is shared across all appliances and/or software/server deployments, and allows us to deliver extremely high levels of storage space savings (please see what our customers said here).

On the other hand, Company U uses a combination of host backup deduplication and inline deduplication, which means there’s always going to be some post-processing of the data. Further, it’s only central to that one appliance – so if you have five Company U appliances, they can’t share the deduplication store.

Recently, Company U added “inline” deduplication – a departure from the initial post processing. However, it’s only file, VMs, Exchange and SQL data. This means data that isn’t inline is still post-processed, such as Oracle data and bare metal file system backup data. In this scenario, you still need a landing a zone and the backup data store needs a lot of storage – hence the specifications discussed above.

Deduplication meets replication – or not:

Arcserve UDP delivers replication across appliances or software RPS servers (UDP’s “brains”) and is a key differentiator. Not only can you do can do restores from these instances, but it’s also great for scalability.

In contrast, Company U doesn’t scale well for the enterprise – each appliance has its own engine, and you have to manage them individually (you can connect from one and see all of them, but there is no global deduplication).

Further, Company U can only do many to one, or one to one – meaning that one appliance can only go to one target of replication. In the words of one customer, “if you have over five appliances, it’s unusable.” There have been many reports of replications issues, where their customers claim “It stops. It’s not working – the replication is cued up and not keeping up.” Alternatively, Arcserve allows you to do many to one, one to many or pretty much any permutation that makes sense for your environment.

Hypervisors:

Bottom line: Company U doesn’t offer cross-hypervisor capabilities. To be fair, they can do Physical to Virtual for Windows machines however to do so, they have to put an agent on the Windows machine and back that up. You can put that image in VMware or HyperV, and on the physical appliance you can run Windows physical backups on their Linux appliance – Windows Instant Recovery. But you would still need an agent on the virtual machines.

In comparison, Arcserve UDP software and appliances support cross-hypervisor recoveries or migrations and agentless backup without limitations. Just what you would expect from a three-time Best of VMworld award winner

User Interface:

Company U debuted a new (much nicer) interface it its 9.0 version. I seem to remember older versions still mentioning OS/2 Warp as OS options, so it was time for a face lift. Nicely done. Except that not everything can be done through it, and you still have to go back to the old interface (that’s what we’ve heard anyway). Oh well.

Cloud: Nebulous:

Company U can go to Cloud, but only directly. While this sounds interesting, you can’t do appliance disk to appliance disk to cloud – or multi-hop, if you will. This is a huge operational limitation, and given the poor deduplication ratios, you likely need to watch you bandwidth closely.

Tape: What?

Check out Arcserve’s impressive support for tape capabilities. Company U offers no support for multiple tape drives, just one drive at a time, and 99% of the vendors are not on the compatibility matrix (I may be exaggerating, but it’s very limited).

Money Talks

Using publicly available list prices, it’s easy to plot a comparison of the cost of protecting 1TB of source data by vendor, based on the publicly recommended specifications. In other words, how much will it cost you to backup 1TB of data with Company U vs. Arcserve. Below are the results with three-year maintenance included (apples-to-apples comparison).

Arcserve also offers a series of models that come with Virtual Standby capabilities. To be complete, here’s what the picture looks like if we compare these models:

Not a day passes without another article about an organization being held hostage with an encryption-based ransom, or ransomware. I am sure the irony of it is not lost on many IT folks: the same tool that is supposed to help secure your data is now used against you in a criminal endeavor. Adding insult to injury, there’s no real way out and you’d better have a Bitcoin account ready to pay up.

Here’s the good news: while it’s not perfect, you already have a great solution in place in your environment to help you out; good old backup. Yes, the unsexy backup function is becoming quite attractive. However, there are some ‘gotchas’ and best practices one must adhere to. Remember, your backup server is a target too.

Many customers have used our solution, Arcserve UDP, to successfully recover affected systems and save their businesses from succumbing to encryption extortionists.. With Arcserve UDP, you can recover a system from scratch and minimize your data loss. Of course, you’d have to get rid of the infected systems and stop the virus from spreading first. However with regular backups, you can significantly reduce the amount of exposure and have the confidence you can recreate a “clean” system. After all, this is a “logical” incident. You would do the same thing if somehow you had corrupted a system and its data; the big difference is the source of the problem.

After discussions with our technical experts, we’ve developed best practices to help you stay out of the ransomware headlines, and keep your business running as usual.

Protect the Source Machine

Take precautions to prevent infection in the first place, such as training users to not click on links within emails, downloading attachments from unknown sources and updating software on a timely basis.

Perform regular backups, which may include rethinking your service level agreements to ensure critical business data is backed up more frequently.

Follow the 3-2-1 strategy for backup: one of the copies should be offline, andat least one of the copies should be offsite.

Make sure your chosen backup solution includes virtual standby for critical systems so that you can get back on your feet very quickly.

Protect the Protector (The Backup Data)

If your backup server gets infected or if your backup data is on a shared network share that is accessible from an infected machine, ransomware can encrypt backup data as well. It sounds obvious, but it’s important to remember!

There is no magic bullet or perfect answer, but it’s important to remember that with an advanced backup solution (such as Arcserve UDP), you have a great tool to help in your fight against ransomware. It starts by educating end users and applying best practices to protect your environment.

13.7 billion years BC – The universe begins as a singularity; those who believe in the “big bang” theory suggest the disaster is on-going…

3.8 billion years BC – The start of life on Earth. The first cell is thought to have arisen from self-replicating RNA what developed later into DNA. DNA is a store of biological data, the genetic information that allows all modern living things to function, grow and reproduce. Put another way, you are the backup of your parents. Say hi to the therapist for me.

65 million years BC – Dinosaurs, not backed up.

13.7 billion years BC – The universe begins as a singularity; those who believe in the “big bang” theory suggest the disaster is on-going…

3.8 billion years BC – The start of life on Earth. The first cell is thought to have arisen from self-replicating RNA what developed later into DNA. DNA is a store of biological data, the genetic information that allows all modern living things to function, grow and reproduce. Put another way, you are the backup of your parents. Say hi to the therapist for me.

65 million years BC – Dinosaurs, not backed up.

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books of All Time,” the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realize the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

1347 AD – The first known insurance contract is signed in Genoa, Italy. This was great for those buying and selling goods and owning property but information is difficult to value, most people would rather have their data back than receive compensation for its loss.

1436 AD – Johannes Gutenberg, a former goldsmith, created the first printing press in Germany. He used his knowledge of metalwork to fashion letters out of an alloy, pressing these against ink and then paper to create a copy. This made the printing of multiple copies considerably faster, a great step forward in data resilience.

1539 AD – Image based backup, born. Henry VIII, King of England was trying to decide who to marry next, he sent the artist Hans Holbein to make a reliable copy of what his list of European princesses looked like. Based on these images, Henry made his choice and proposed engagement to Anne of Cleeves only to discover she looked nothing like he expected. Corrupt data/bad copy.

48 BC – The burning of the Library of Alexandria. Among others in your “Top 10 Lost Books of All Time,” the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics went up in smoke and humanity was beginning to realize the fatal flaw in their cunning backup plan; paper is actually quite flammable.

1347 AD – The first known insurance contract is signed in Genoa, Italy. This was great for those buying and selling goods and owning property but information is difficult to value, most people would rather have their data back than receive compensation for its loss.

1436 AD – Johannes Gutenberg, a former goldsmith, created the first printing press in Germany. He used his knowledge of metalwork to fashion letters out of an alloy, pressing these against ink and then paper to create a copy. This made the printing of multiple copies considerably faster, a great step forward in data resilience.

1539 AD – Image based backup, born. Henry VIII, King of England was trying to decide who to marry next, he sent the artist Hans Holbein to make a reliable copy of what his list of European princesses looked like. Based on these images, Henry made his choice and proposed engagement to Anne of Cleeves only to discover she looked nothing like he expected. Corrupt data/bad copy.

1964 AD – Mass market computing begins, the Programma 101 was unveiled to the public at the New York World’s fair. One of these computers was used on Apollo 11 and it was pretty much… a calculator. “One small step…” (at a time!)

1972 AD – Mainframe computers deliver applications and data at high speed to hundreds of users, in-built hardware redundancy ensures exceptional RPOs and RTOs. The ancient Sumerians would have just lovedthis.

1990 AD – Arcserve 1.0 released by Cheyenne software. The age of distributed computing is in full swing and it is all about backing up to these little rectangular things called “tapes.”

1998 AD – VMware founded in Palo Alto, California. Although the concept of a hypervisor originated from 1960s, it was VMware who introduced hardware virtualization to the mass market. Virtualization will go on to revolutionize backup and disaster recovery.

2006 AD – XOsoft’s WANsync technology is integrated into Arcserve. For the first time mid-market users can perform both backup and full system failover from one solution.

2008 AD – Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualized before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

2006 AD – XOsoft’s WANsync technology is integrated into Arcserve. For the first time mid-market users can perform both backup and full system failover from one solution.

2008 AD – Microsoft releases their competing product to VMware, they call it Hyper V. If you weren’t virtualized before, you are now. Specific software for virtual backup exists but there is little integration with physical servers, tape backups or cross platform Microsoft/Linux.

2016 is off to an exciting start with Veeam and Arcserve releasing their latest versions. Veeam releaded the V9 Availability Suite and Arcserve released UDP6 (codenamed “Tungsten”).

Side note: Veeam coined the Phrase “RTPO” which is essentially means “RTO and RPO”. Personally, I disagree with this term as I think that the two terms are completely independent from one another: “Restore Time” and “Restore Point”. This is just my opinion.

Both are excellent products. I have had some time to test both capabilities and have done some research on their features. Below, I have a comparison based on the new features of Veeam V9 vs Arcserve UDP V6 and how each one delivers its’ functionality.

Instant VM Restore

An instant VM restore, or IVM, is about mounting your latest backup point to your Hypervisor host as a temporary data store point and registering that VM into the virtual infrastructure for immediate accessibility. It is no longer necessary to wait for your restore to copy points from backup disk into production – with IVM your RTO is seconds to minutes.

Veeam has had this functionality in previous versions, but has added some development: vPower Cache. This feature allows for recently accessed backup files to be cached and this will assist in speeding up instant VM restores, unlike Arcserve’s IVM.

UDP6 has just developed this feature in the new release V6. UDP 6 does have vPower functionality and can support instant VM restore cross-hypervisor, can instantly restore a VMware VM onto Hyper-V. In addition, UDP 6 also protects physical machines and allows for instant VM recovery of a physical node “P2V IVM”. This is very powerful stuff, unlike Veeam’s IVM.

Replica VM – Virtual Standby (For Disaster Recovery)

Replica VM or Virtual Standby “VSB” is a pre-exported conversion of your latest backup point into a virtual machine ready to power up in the event that production VM is lost. This is not a new feature for Veeam or Arcserve, but I would like to compare the two in any case.

Veeam has replica VM functionality , which is easy to use. You can create a replica VM off of the latest backup point or live snapshot process on your production VM. Both Veeam and Arcserve have networking and configuration functionality on these tasks. I would like to mention Veeam’s DR failover plan here. Where the plan is created with a boot sequence of multiple VMs, this failover plan allows you to commit to replica VMs or fail back to production VM.

UDP6 has what is called “Virtual Standby” that very easy to use. You can have a backup plan create virtual instances of the latest backup point. UDP6 VSB supports virtual standby cross-hypervisors and “P2V” (physical to virtual). This would mean you can have a VSB of your Vmware VM on hyper V or vica versa. This also means that you can have a VSB of a physical node onto your hypervisor. In addition, once failed over to VSB from the physical node you are able to restore back to the physical node directly off of the virtual standby to incorporate the latest changes written to the VSB.

Instant Bare Metal Recovery “BMR”for Linux

For Linux physical machines, Arcserve UDP introduces Instant Bare Metal Restore (BMR) to support local and remote bare metal recovery of Linux physical machines. Instant BMR provides better restore capability and an improved end user experience by providing users with instant access to a target machine prior to the entire recovery process being finished. This is done without physical interaction with the Linux nodes across the network though PXE boot solution.

Veeam does not currently support this and has limited support for physical server environments, as it was originally designed for Virtual solutions.

UDP6 provides for exactly what has been described above. Arcserve can instantly regain access into a failed physical Linux node with instant BMR. This is a first of its’ kind and a very powerful feature.

Granular Restore Tools “GRT”

GRT are interfaces that the backup vendor develops to facilitate for granular level restore back into applications. Example: an exchange GRT, allowing single mail items to be restored from a DB backup back into a mailbox into the live exchange DB. Most backup products support file level GRT as this is supported by Windows Explorer.

Veeam refers to a GRT as a “Veeam Explorer” and has in their new release V9 an Oracle Explorer and Veeam has granular VM recovery in Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.

UDP6 refers to this as “GRT” and has integrated this into the console restore capabilities, rather than having to install a separate feature application. Arcserve must be commended on its exchange GRT as this is very granular, allowing restores of mail down to calendar and tasks back into a mailbox. However, Arcserve currently supports Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and Linux file/folder on GRT. Granular restores are still possible for Oracle, SharePoint and SQL but rather through its’ own interface.

Corruption Guard or Recovery Point Check

This feature tests the data integrity of the files systems in the backup points to ensure no corruption on backup points and no loss to data or unusable restore points.

This is a new feature for Veeam called “Corruption Guard”. This runs a process similar to check disk CHKDSK that tests and repairs file system data integrity issues on your backup restore points.

This is not a new feature to Arcserve. The feature is called “RPC” or Recovery Point Check. Arcserve will mount the restore point and actively run a CHKDSK on the files system and repair any corruption.

Backup Data Reduction

This is somewhat a large topic as it covers a variety of features. Data reduction on backup mainly consists of compression and global deduplication in most cases. Deduplication is the comparison to data across a deduplication domain only holding one instance of unique data, thus cancelling out redundant data being held on backup. Compression will compact files during backup to shrink the backup size to as small as possible.

Veeam has added a few features and further development on their de-duplication feature.The largest setback on Veeam’s global deduplication is that it’s not so global. The deduplication domain is across a single job – only servers within a plan will be de-duped against one another. There has been added development where multiple VMs within a job can be de-duplicated in parallel across both live backup streams. In addition, they have focused on third party storage vendors’ deduplication (such as HP and Netapp) to assist in reducing their backup footprint to storage.

Another feature, defragmentation and compact, will assist on further reducing the backup foot print over longer retention periods. This will access backup points and remove deleted data or VMs without requiring you to create a new active full.

Scale-out backup repositories (SoBR) and bitlooker are further additions to the V9 release.

Bitlooker allows you to exclude files and folders from your backup (e.g. exclude c:\temp). Further to that, it will allow you to exclude blocks that are marked as deleted. When a file is deleted in Windows, the space isn’t actually wiped clean – Windows just removes that file from the master file table, effectively forgetting about it and allowing future data to occupy the space. Unfortunately, because the data is still occupying space, it is getting backed up. BitLooker recognizes this fact and skips over these files.

The scale-out backup repository allows you to create a backup storage pool using multiple physical storage appliances, thus creating a federated storage repository. This increases write performance, as backups are written in multiple streams to multiple devices and this will also reduce storage cost (because you can repurpose storage devices).

UDP6 has true source side global de-duplication. The deduplication domain is at the backup server (RPS) storage level. Similar to Veeam, storage is presented through Windows or IscsI to Arcserve, but all backups to Arcserve storage repository are de-duplicated against each other, allowing for multiple plans/jobs/policies. This runs at 32k, 16k, 8k or 4k block size levels with a forever incremental strategy utilising CBT change block tracking. This means that only changed data blocks from the source are included into the backup pass. Furthermore, these blocks are compared to the backup storage repository to confirm they are indeed unique, thus massively reducing the storage requirement for backup on arcserve UDP. Both physical and virtual will be included in the same de-duplication domain. UDP6 has included physical Linux nodes into this single de-duplication domain. Impressive lab results have shown that protecting half a Petabyte of storage has left a storage footprint of 13.5TB on backup disk. Whilst the storage features Veeam V9 has developed are beneficial, these seem to be in place to assist their struggling de-duplication protocol or algorithm. Arcserve seems to have hit the nail on the head when it comes to data reduction, leaving backup simple yet efficient.

Stand Alone Console

The console would be the management interface for the backup application where reports and logs, jobs, schedules etc. can be configured.

Veeam has released a standalone console in V9 that allows you to install an application on your workstation that will connect to your Veeam backup servers on the network instead of multiple RDP sessions to your backup servers. The Veeam console is an installed application and so is the standalone server. Performance here is impacted by server or workstation CPU and memory utilization.

This has always been a feature for Arcserve (UDP stands for “Unified Data Protection”). Arcserve offers a unified console that is web based and backed by Tomcat. This has a tiny footprint when it comes to compute overhead and is browseable via Http or Https on any workstation or mobile device on your network.

ROBO Support

ROBO (Remote Office, Branch Office) support allows for your main backup infrastructure to communicate and maintain processes or jobs on your remote sites. This should allow for features such as remote backup/restore capabilities and reporting on multiple sites from a central location.

Veeam previously had issues relaying commands from Veeam B&R console to backup proxies across the WAN sites or VPN tunnels. In V9, Veeam has released Guest Interaction Proxy which allows for a secure SSL connection between sites and proxies back to B&R console. This allows for remote restore across WAN sites and mounting backup points locally. This was a much needed feature for Veeam service providers.

UDP had a similar issue when it came to ROBO solutions where this had to be done through VPN connection. Even so, this worked and was functional to each remote site. In UDP6, the Remote Management Gateway feature allows for secure SSL connections across WAN links to ROBO sites. It allows for all management out of a single console and the ability to configure and push agents from one console for all sites. This compliments the existing unified console.

Cloud Connect (Cloud Backup & Replication)

Cloud backup and replication allows for the backup product console to connect to a service provider service such as storage or compute resource. This will allow the customer to replicate VM copies or backup points offsite into the cloud and pose as a DR (Disaster Recovery) solution.

Veeam has added development to their cloud connect feature. Previously, this only allowed for copying backup points to a cloud target, but Veeam V9 brings the replication feature too.

Previously, I discussed Veeam’s replica VMs. A customer with an onsite Veeam installation can enter details of their Veeam service provider’s Veeam B&R Gateway and replicate replica VMs to their service provider. A limitation is that if you are replicating from Hyper V, your service provider must provide Hyper V.

This is not a new feature for Arcserve. Arcserve does this differently, though. The service provider creates a share plan with credentials and a secondary task to export as a virtual standby on either Hyper V or VMware. These credentials are shared with the customer. The customer will add a task to their backup plan to replicate to a remotely managed RPS server and use the credentials provided. The target hypervisor is cross compatible and the source and target hypervisor can differ in this instance. Arcserve supports this on physical servers too at the source, which allows for P2V to the service provider (“Physical to Virtual”).

Hardware Integrated Snapshots

Hardware snapshots allow the backup software to access the hardware array and initiate a snapshot of a VM of the hardware array, utilising the array compute resource to carry out the backup process. This results in a more efficient snapshot.

Veeam has done a lot of development with various storage vendors and has support on multiple storage arrays, such as NetApp and HP and the new edition in V9 of EMC. Veeam has also released Sandbox for HW snapshots in V9. This creates a clone of a snapshot into an isolated environment for testing purposes directly off the storage appliance, cutting out the unnecessary overhead.

UDP6 includes a hardware level snapshot integration in the new release for Netapp .

Tape

Veeam has released advanced support for Tape in the V9 release. This includes parallel rocessing, concurrent copy sessions and GFS rotation schemes (“Grand Father, Father, Son “). Tape is still underdeveloped for Veeam .

UDP6 has integration into its father product, Arcserve backup, which has been around for over 20 years. With over 20 years of development around tape features and support, it is far superior to Veeam’s Tape functionality. These features include: Multiplexing (2-32 jobs), Multistreaming, Device Group and Media Pool, GFS Rotation and Synthetic Backup, Append Media, Media Maximization, Media Pool Manager, Tape Library Option and Auto Library Detection and Configuration, Bar Code Support, Auto Inventory, Auto Eject Medi, Monitor Blank Media Qty., Tape Management and Tape Vaulting, Auto Tape Cleaning and Configurable Block Size for Tape.

Both products have their features that stand out. In my opinion, a lot of the new features Veeam has added to their suite were pre-existing with Arcserve since 2014 and before the release of UDP. Veeam seems to be playing catch-up. Veeam also doesn’t have a developed protection solution for your physical server workloads. Arcserve has physical and virtual protection features with integration into your environment which allows for physical to virtual, virtual to physical, virtual to virtual, “ Vmware to Hyper V “ restore/conversion functionality.

Arcserve also holds a replication and high availability suite that has been integrated into UDP, which allows for more than just disaster recovery and actually provides what Veeam claims to be: always on, automated fail over and instant replication of your business critical services.

With the new release UDP6, so comes the functionality of instant Linux BMR (Bare Metal Restore) which allows you to recover physical hardware remotely and instantly. This feature would be also be great for Windows environments not yet available.

A great solution for the remote recovery of physical Windows servers is to use Windows Deployment Service (WDS) integrating Arcserve UDP 6 Restore Capabilities with WDS, allowing for remote physical restore. It is no longer a requirement to have an engineer standing in front of your data centre rack to run system state recoveries on your physical system.

In this post I explain how I have created such an implementation and tested it!

The prerequisites are a Windows server and DHCP server (I used Virtual Servers in my testing but it applies to physical servers too).

The process would be to access your physical server through remote BIOS (e.g. ILO, IPMI or IDRAC or similar) and setting the server to network boot, at which point the server will PXE boot the Arcserve Windows BMR ISO files.

I used one server for the implementation: Server 2012 R2, running Arcserve UDP Console and RPS roles. I added Windows roles WDS and DHCP.

This one server had an Arcserve agent, so I created a BMR ISO for X86 and X64 compatible with ADK 8.1. You can create both Windows 8 and Windows 7 compatible boot kit ISOs for Server 2008 and 2012 physical server spreads in your environment.

*One important thing to note: if you run WDS and DHCP on the same server then some properties need to be altered on WDS as they both listen on the same port.

Once your BMR ISOs are created, browse to their location and mount ISOs.

Then open WDS MMC through Server Manager: under “Boot Images” browse, select add boot image and follow the wizard.

Since Lotus Domino is an application non-VSS aware, the database’s consistency must be guaranteed during the Arcserve Snapshot of Lotus Domino process.

Using Lotus Domino as corporate messaging system, the database’s consistency is guaranteed running custom quiescing scripts (pre-freeze and post-thaw or Cache Flush) stored in C:\Windows in the Domino Server during the backup job.

Arcserve is a leading provider of data protection and recovery software.

Arcserve provides organizations with the assurance that they can recover their data and applications when needed. Founded in 1990, Arcserve provides a comprehensive solution for virtual and physical environments, on premise or in the cloud, backed by unsurpassed support and expertise. Our new unified architecture, Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), drives a full range of highly efficient and integrated data protection capabilities through a simple, web-based user console.

Arcserve has an active customer base of 43,000 end users in more than 50 countries. The company partners with over 7,500 distributors, resellers and service providers around the world. Arcserve is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota with offices around the world.

This blog is to keep you updated and informed when it comes to data protection and recovery software.